replacing the Startup Disk Creator

[Marc Deslauriers]

On 2015-09-19 07:04 AM, Nio Wiklund wrote:
> Hi Marc,
> 
> My standard ISP's mail server is down. So I tried to send this mail via Google's
> web mail interface. In my saved version of the mail, there is an attachment
> "SCC-test.ods", size 17692 bytes. I'll try again ...
> 
> Best regards
> Nio
> 

That's a very interesting spreadsheet, thanks for doing that. It seems most
issues are:

- A known bug in udisks that prevents the erase function from working reliably
(LP: #1460602)

- A mismatch between syslinux versions between the host system creating the usb
key and the version being installed (LP: #1325801)

- A limitation of the fix for the syslinux issue that prevents amd64 images from
being created on i386 systems (LP: #1446646)


I believe a simple way to eliminate every one of these issues at once in UDC
would be to get rid of the persistence functionality. All of the currently
supported images can now be written directly to a usb device as-is.

The syslinux and boot loader mangling that is currently required for persistence
and used to be required for older end of life releases is a constant source of
problems each time a new release come out and is difficult to get working
properly on mismatched architectures.

Removing persistence would also simplify the user interface and would remove the
need of having the "Erase Disk" button, therefore eliminating the known udisks
issue as a side effect.

Advanced users who require generating a usb key with persistence can simply use
one of the other tools that are available. Perhaps in the future persistence
could be added back by creating a partition in the free space left over after
copying over the image.

Changing UDC to remove persistence and to copy images as-is is a trivial change,
and I am willing to volunteer to do it.

Marc.